Leveson Report

The next milestone following the Leveson Inquiry and Report has been reached this week. Press regulators can now apply to us, the Press Recognition Panel (PRP), for "recognition". After consulting widely on draft proposals over the summer, we have explained how we will go about that recognition process.

As IPSO - the press' response to Leveson - opened for business this week, newspapers may be wondering whether they will be able to convince the public that it is not just a replica of its discredited predecessor, the Press Complaints Commission. No doubt IPSO will receive praise from newspapers themselves - at least initially. But will this be enough to paper over its shortcomings? Based on the public's response to the coverage of the Leveson Report and its implementation by the national press, the answer is no. It is highly unlikely that positive newspaper coverage will ever convince the public that IPSO is independent or effective.

I can never be sure whether any of the stories I worked on were expedited by the headlining practise of hacking. What I can be sure of is that a number of leads that had reached a dead end, had all of a sudden endless avenues after a hack's surreptitious chat with news desk elders. It is amazing what you can learn by eavesdropping on a phone call of a hack, rather than hacking a phone of a Jude Law.

Forget Andy Coulson. If you can, forget phone-hacking. The real scandal is how senior politicians - and police officers - allowed themselves to be used by a ruthless media tycoon for his own commercial ends. And if you think it's all over, it's not.

When asked what he thought of western civilisation, the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi replied that 'I think it would be a great idea'. The verdicts handed down from the phone hacking trial together with the information contained during the eight months at the Old Bailey suggest pretty much the same thing. We need a free and fearless press because we certainly don't appear to have one now.

There is no reason to doubt Sir Alan's sincerity, nor his personal desire to act independently. But it will be fascinating to see how he tries to put his personal independence into practice from a position where the independence and freedom to manoeuvre is so seriously compromised and constrained before he has even stepped over the threshold.

In 2009 newspapers were arguing to MPs that the existence of a no-win-no-fee system giving some ordinary people the ability to sue papers for breaching their rights was an unacceptable constraint on press freedom. The talk of 300 years of press freedom is not based on the facts but is an argument of convenience. Today these papers declare that the press has been free for centuries, but tomorrow, if it suits them, the same papers will insist with equal ardour that the press has never been free.

Much of the press has wildly misread the public mood on press reform. After a weekend of Leveson-bashing and breathless attacks on the Royal Charter agreed by parliament, a new poll conducted by YouGov for the Media Standards Trust and reported in the Guardian shows public backing for the judge's reform to be as strong as ever.

The weekly email exchanges I have with the HuffPost mothership in America are usually fairly straightforward; we swap ideas for global reporting features, maybe pass requests on for a new piece of functionality. And then, every now and again, I have to explain an odd British quirk to a befuddled Yank reading an article on the UK version of the site and coming up against a brick wall of comprehension. We may share a common language, but there's still plenty of translating that needs doing.

If David Cameron skewers the cross-party Charter, we can be absolutely certain that the cycle of abuse will continue... Parliament has delivered its verdict, with overwhelming support from the public, and it's now up to Cameron to hold his nerve.

We are asked to believe that while the poor newspapers have been hounded over phone hacking, 'blue-chip companies' of all sorts are getting clean away with paying private investigators to break the law on a vast scale. What is striking about this claim is not the fragmentary evidence on which it is based nor the way it has been overblown in the newspapers (and we will return to those matters soon), but the breathtaking hypocrisy of it all.

Our choice is plain. Do we have the latest model, cosmetically-altered self-regulator designed to serve the interests of the industry that owns it, or do we have a truly independent body that meets standards proposed by an exhaustive public inquiry and protects citizens from abuse while also protecting free speech?

It is an ugly spectacle: a Cabinet minister being pushed around in public by a powerful and unscrupulous vested interest. But that seems to be what is happening to Maria Miller, and she is not putting up much of a fight. This week she announced that she would give precedence to the wishes of PressBoF, an organisation of newspaper bosses roundly condemned in the Leveson Report, over the wishes of every single party in our elected Parliament, as expressed in a formal motion on 18 March.

The fact is that quality, independent, varied media, in which a wide range of voices and public views can be heard, are essential for our democracy. Given our current problems with democracy, with sinking election turnouts and widespread disillusionment, this is an issue that cannot be ignored.

When you've been untouchable and all powerful and have successfully fought off seven previous government attempts to put an end to press abuse, you don't give your power up lightly. So the announcement that three newspaper groups have "rejected" the Royal Charter, recently agreed by a united House of Commons, is not surprising.